Con-IH 2006

Harvard Annual Graduate Student Conference

International History at Harvard University

Baber Johansen (Harvard University)

Baber Johansen is Professor of Islamic Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School.
Prior to his appointment there in 2005, he served as directeur d'études at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Professor for Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. His most recent
book, Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh (1999), introduces the relation
between law and theology in Islam and Western efforts to analyze both forms of knowledge. His research and
teaching focus on the relationship between religion and law in the classical and the modern Muslim world.
He is particularly interested in the role that religious and legal systems assign to the practices of
laypeople as factors that exert an influence on the interpretation of sacred norms.